China Survives a Big Year

Dec. 27 (Bloomberg) -- The year 2012 will go into thehistory books as one of contrasting transitions. China’s five-year cycle for Communist Party congresses and leadershipturnover overlapped with the U.S.’s four-year electoralcalendar. And if that once-in-20-years coincidence wasn’tenough, Egypt’s rocky shift from dictatorship to democracycontinues to remind us of what transition looks like in theabsence of a predictable institutional framework.

The confluence of Chinese and American transitions marks anextraordinary historic development. The last time this happened,we might not have been able to predict the impeachment of BillClinton or the Supreme Court deciding the 2000 presidentialelection in Bush v. Gore. But any reasonable observer would haveexpected that presidential elections would continue in theirordinary course, and that the crises associated with impeachmentand an uncertain electoral outcome would be resolved in aregular fashion, not by palace coups or purges.